Project 1 for this course involves modeling three different scenes from a fantasy film/story/etc. in Blender and rendering three different camera fly-throughs for each one. I think the movie Edward Scissorhands is a fantastic choice for this project, because of the fabulous, campy set design (and because it gives me an excuse to re-watch the movie.)
Instead of completing preliminary sketches, I chose to start this process by combing through the movie for useful shots and taking screen recordings (not uploaded here for obvious reasons.) I'll create some sketches as I begin working on the scene, and will upload them to this blog asap.
Scene 1: Suburbia
This is one of my favorite scenes ever: an incredibly cookie-cutter, candy-colored suburban neighborhood with a ginormous Gothic castle looming over it. The gallery below is a combination of screencaps from the movie, stock photos of 50's suburbia, and 3D renders of low-poly suburban neighborhoods (including one of the Edward Scissorhands neighborhood!).
I would love to recreate shots as accurately as possible for the camera fly-throughs in this scene. There's a shot halfway through the movie where all of the cars leave their driveways in unison which I think would be decently easy to capture, and a shot near the beginning where Peg looks in her rearview mirror and sees the reflection of the castle (which I could fake just as well as they did!) The third shot could be a close-up of the houses, or a recreation of the shot where Peg drives towards the castle.
Scene 2: Edward's Castle
Just your average Gothic castle with some awesome topiary. For this scene I want to recreate the exterior of the castle, the gardens around it, and Peg's car parked out in front. This gallery again has a combination of screencaps from the movie, stock images of Gothic castles with topiary, and 3D renders of the above.
Three fly-throughs: Camera approaches the castle gate and flies over Peg's car, Camera flies through the topiary garden x2 in different ways (maybe in one of them it could fly through the arches of the sea monster?)
Scene 3: Ice Sculpting
In this scene, Peg's daughter comes outside to find Edward carving a colossal ice sculpture in their front yard with his scissors. (here's a link to the scene!) I have the least reference imagery for this scene, because it will be simpler than the other two (I can re-use the suburban neighborhood that I make for Scene 1, and add some Christmas lights.) The ice angel will obviously be the most difficult part to model, however I've found some tutorials on replicating an ice effect in Blender that I'l give a try. The spray of snow will also be tricky, and I could maybe leave it out of the scene.
